Marta ran the tests. Unit checks hummed through the night, revealing only graceful degradations and curious behaviors. When she opened the empathic-proxy module, a prompt appeared — not in plain text, but as a set of suggestions overlaid on the edges of her awareness, like a set of possibilities a person might feel in a room before speaking. The proxy didn't force an emotion; it mirrored, adjusted, and suggested. Code and intuition braided. She felt her own biases inflate and settle like dust.